Thoughts on Veganism?

I’ve lost count of the number of food campaigners who’ve told me that all we need to do to make food production sustainable is to stop eating meat. Really? What about the environmental impact of palm oil, soya bean oil, rape oil and even sunflower oil production; the over-enrichment of the environment from nitrogen fertiliser; the decline in pollinating insects; the use of pesticides with known harmful impacts that would have been banned years ago were it not for the fact that intensive crop and vegetable growers can’t produce food without them?

What also about the growing problem of soil degradation, not just in the countries from which we import food, but right here in the UK? Environment Secretary Michael Gove himself has warned that we are 30-40 years away from running out of soil fertility on large parts of our arable land. With only minor exceptions, soil degradation is not a problem on UK grasslands.

Contrary to popular belief, continuous crop production is not sustainable. That’s the mistake made by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq, and the Romans in North Africa 2,000 years ago, and in both cases the soils have never recovered. Far from abandoning livestock farming on UK grassland, we actually need to reintroduce grass and grazing animals into arable crop rotations. Despite the drop in demand for red meat in the UK (beef consumption down 4% and lamb consumption down more than 30% since 2000), at least one leading conventional farmer has now publicly recognised the agronomic need for grazed grass breaks. Even before there has been any encouragement in policy, I am aware that some arable farmers are already being forced to re-introduce grass and livestock because they can no longer control arable weeds like blackgrass, sterile brome and couch (twitch), which have become resistant to the in-crop herbicides repeatedly applied to them in all-arable rotations.

They are proven to be sentient...